Sunday, May 06, 2012

The problem with postmoderns who make grand universal claims about what's real is found in the vantage point and criteria with which one presumes to arbitrate such an architectonically prior notion in the first place.

Everything postmodern I've read seems to just be generic old fixed-factor reductionism, the same as Marxism, Behaviorism, Materialism, Contextualism, and so on. Pick your favorite universally determining factors and away
we go, spawning universal explanatory reductionisms, arbitrating the
existence, nature, and status of what's real, and so on.

Postmodern rhetoric is good for 1) logical analysis, 2) defense
attorneys, 3) sociopaths and others into hoodwinking people in various senses, and 4) students who want to rhetorically hoax their way
through a substantial number of school courses with writing
requirements. Viva Joey Skaggs! [Look up "Sokel Hoax" to see what I mean]

Baudrillard's brief essay on nihilism is just sermonizing, merely one unargued pronouncement after another. It's just a selective
preening neo-modernism grandstanding itself, in spite of its own assertions.

But
postmodernism in general makes it much easier when I'm lobbying rich
alumni to close down those useless and meaningless wastes of money
called philosophy departments---as an expression of their
nihilism. Others can play the nihilism game too---but in this case by redirecting the money that's
normally used to prop up people who insult the views of those funding
them.

Noise, anger, explosive tones, superlatives, exaggerations of passion, add nothing to the force of what we say, but rather rob our words of the power that belongs to them. But the utterance that shows a spirit subdued by truth and mastered by wisdom is the utterance that sweeps away opposition, that persuades and overcomes. It's not those who get angry and storm and swear who carry the day, but those who never lose their tempers and who never raise their voices, who keep talking quietly and placidly as if they were discussing the weather.